What is programmatic video advertising?

Video advertising has made its way over the past couple of years as one of the most popular ad formats in digital advertising. Emarketers predicts that by 2019, 77% of all US digital video ad dollars will be spent programmatically. So It’s no surprise when you hear that marketers plan to increase their video advertising spends by 25% this year alone. Let’s look into what programmatic video advertising is and why publishers should leverage this type of ad inventory.

So, what is programmatic video advertising?

Programmatic video advertising - as the name would suggest - is the same thing as programmatic advertising, as it uses the same technology to deliver ads, with the difference that it contains video content.

What are the different types of video ads?

Just like programmatic advertising has multiple format options, there are also multiple options for video ads.

Instream

Instream video ads are ads that are integrated into existing video content available on a website. A good example would be the ads seen at the beginning of a Youtube video.

Instream video is available in pre-roll, mid-roll and, post-roll, which gives the publisher the flexibility to access more demand.

Outstream

As opposed to instream, outstream video ads do not need an existing video to run. It is typically located inside non-video content, for example, in a page break of an article.

The biggest perk of outstream video is that it does not need video content to live, so publishers for whom video is less popular or irrelevant can still leverage video advertising.

In-display

In-display ads are Youtube specific and can appear in 3 different locations. The first one is on the home page, when no keywords have been entered in the search bar. The second is very similar to search ads that you find on Google and will appear at the top of a search page once keywords have been entered. The last location where in-display ads can appear is in the sidebar next to the video content the user is watching.

Should publishers leverage video ad inventory?

The simple answer is: Yes. For publishers with video content, it makes a lot of sense because instream video advertising is in high demand and can generate very high eCPMs. For publishers that don’t create video content, outstream video ads are still a great way to generate incremental revenue.

Video ads used to be seen as rather intrusive and annoying formats, however they have matured over the year and publishers are now in a good position to monetize their video ad inventory while still offering a great user experience to their website visitors.

The Coalition for Better Ads further strengthens publishers ability to conciliate video ad inventory monetization and user experience with its new sets of standards which prohibit autoplay video ads with sound.